More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
28 June
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Showing posts with label Take the Money and Run. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Take the Money and Run. Show all posts
Thursday, 20 June 2013
Friday, 22 March 2013
Woody took me with him, money or no
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
22 March
Starting out, and even with Annie Hall (1977), Woody Allen collaborated with Mickey Rose, as he did on the screenplay of Take the Money and Run (1969) (though not the direction). He has talked about working with Rose and also Marshall Brickman, and said that he liked the variety doing so gave him (Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993) is a later piece of co-authorship with Brickman).
Stardust Memories (1980), coming after the ill-received sombre drama that was Interiors (1978) and Manhattan (1979) (co-written with Brickman), almost mercilessly mocks these ‘early funny films’, but here we can see how well elements work, such as faultless delivery of the punch-line and of the joke built on leading up to incongruity. The recent film documentary of Allen drew the attention of those who did not know to how he began, as a gag-writer, and Rose and he know how to construct them : after 15 minutes, Virgil Starkwell (Allen in a voice-over) was in love with Louise; after 30 minutes, he had decided not to steal her handbag.
But there are many other things in play, with references both to cinema literacy, and even James Joyce (with 16 June, the Bloomsday featured in Ulysses, the date of a big bank robbery cum fake film, complete with a sort of, if possible, even more crazy Erich von Stroheim) : Allen effortlessly makes films that come afterwards, such as Stir Crazy (1980) or O Brother, Where Art Thou ? (2000), seem just lumbering, keeping in one groove, whereas Rose and Allen have leapt on to a new theme and feel for that part of the film.
In this his, if you include the strange film that is What’s Up, Tiger Lily ? (1966), second feature, his camera angles are already inventive, he as his own leading man and Janet Margolin as Louise parody their own domesticity as gangster and moll (Louise saying ‘You know, he never made the ten most-wanted list. It’s very unfair voting – it’s who you know’), and a quick moment when the side-effect of a drug-trial has Virgil turn into a rabbi for a few hours, with clever cutting between the onlookers and the subject, is – along with the mock-documentary story-telling (Virgil’s parents being interviewed about him, both disguised with Groucho glasses that sport bushy eyebrows and moustache, plus a patently plastic beak-like nose) – where he comes back to, in 1983, with Zelig.
The film is funny and fresh, and it was a delight to catch up with Allen and his cynical take on romance, where the love is in the early days of fascination and attraction, and irritating habits and silly misunderstandings make it wear thin. We simply do not ask whether Louise, an unlikely laundress, would seek out Virgil, who turns out not to be a cellist with the Philharmonic (but a failed bank-robber), because we are having too much fun !
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
22 March
Starting out, and even with Annie Hall (1977), Woody Allen collaborated with Mickey Rose, as he did on the screenplay of Take the Money and Run (1969) (though not the direction). He has talked about working with Rose and also Marshall Brickman, and said that he liked the variety doing so gave him (Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993) is a later piece of co-authorship with Brickman).
Stardust Memories (1980), coming after the ill-received sombre drama that was Interiors (1978) and Manhattan (1979) (co-written with Brickman), almost mercilessly mocks these ‘early funny films’, but here we can see how well elements work, such as faultless delivery of the punch-line and of the joke built on leading up to incongruity. The recent film documentary of Allen drew the attention of those who did not know to how he began, as a gag-writer, and Rose and he know how to construct them : after 15 minutes, Virgil Starkwell (Allen in a voice-over) was in love with Louise; after 30 minutes, he had decided not to steal her handbag.
But there are many other things in play, with references both to cinema literacy, and even James Joyce (with 16 June, the Bloomsday featured in Ulysses, the date of a big bank robbery cum fake film, complete with a sort of, if possible, even more crazy Erich von Stroheim) : Allen effortlessly makes films that come afterwards, such as Stir Crazy (1980) or O Brother, Where Art Thou ? (2000), seem just lumbering, keeping in one groove, whereas Rose and Allen have leapt on to a new theme and feel for that part of the film.
In this his, if you include the strange film that is What’s Up, Tiger Lily ? (1966), second feature, his camera angles are already inventive, he as his own leading man and Janet Margolin as Louise parody their own domesticity as gangster and moll (Louise saying ‘You know, he never made the ten most-wanted list. It’s very unfair voting – it’s who you know’), and a quick moment when the side-effect of a drug-trial has Virgil turn into a rabbi for a few hours, with clever cutting between the onlookers and the subject, is – along with the mock-documentary story-telling (Virgil’s parents being interviewed about him, both disguised with Groucho glasses that sport bushy eyebrows and moustache, plus a patently plastic beak-like nose) – where he comes back to, in 1983, with Zelig.
The film is funny and fresh, and it was a delight to catch up with Allen and his cynical take on romance, where the love is in the early days of fascination and attraction, and irritating habits and silly misunderstandings make it wear thin. We simply do not ask whether Louise, an unlikely laundress, would seek out Virgil, who turns out not to be a cellist with the Philharmonic (but a failed bank-robber), because we are having too much fun !
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